Exhibitions

In 1878, a museum was opened within the precincts of Nagoya's Soken-ji Temple, which had often served as an exposition site in the early Meiji Period (1868-1912). Five years later, it came to be managed by the prefectural government and was fittingly dubbed the Aichi Prefectural Museum. The museum underwent a series of changes in name, such as the Commercial Museum, and differed markedly from the typical image of a museum today. It was a large-scale general museum housed, exhibited, and also sold items and goods from a wide range of fields, including art and crafts, history, public hygiene, education, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, industry, and mining. The facility also housed a zoo and a greenhouse. Although museums were being built throughout the country after World War II, the idea of such a facility, conceived as a general museum of industry and technology with an emphasis on promoting new industry, was inexplicably forgotten. In this exhibition, we consider the Aichi Prefectural Museum that might have been.